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Motion DSP vReveal Software Review

Introduction:

You all know the TV show CSI, the show where old actors who can't get jobs making feature films solve repetative crimes. I know that is very blunt, but that's basically what it is. If you watch the show, you'll see the actors do certain repetitive things in order to figure out how someone has died, or to figure out who their prime suspect will be. One of the tools the writers of CSI will use in order to do this is a special photo editing program. It allows them to take extremely pixelated, shaky, noisy, dark, and blurry pictures, and then turn them into crystal clear images. We know of course, programs like this are not readily available to the public, at least until now! To be honest, when I first heard about this product I was quite skeptical, but I was told it was, "real life CSI stuff." I figured 'what the heck, I'll give it a shot'. vReveal was created by MotionDSP for Microsoft Windows. It is designed to do two things: drastically improve the quality of flawed videos and make it extraordinarily easy to do so! MotionDSP is the creator of Ikena, which is a forensic software actually used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. vReveal is an adaption of this software, so it should hopefully do what it is supposed to.

Another interesting little fact is that vReveal was designed for CUDA-enabled GPUs. In other words, it was designed to take advantage of the parallel computing power of the NVIDIA GPU. If you're using an older NVIDIA card, or refuse to use anything other then ATI cards, you've got nothing to worry about. vReveal will still work with any CPU, but it was designed to use the many cores of a GPU. This means vReveal is able to process your video up to 5 times faster, while utilizing a CUDA-enabled GPU. So how does this software work? A video is basically a linear collection of multiple images encoded in an either magnetic or digital format. Well, actually, that is really all it is. Anyway MotionDSP’s powerful algorithms will analyze multiple frames in order to get the best possible outcome. Because there is also motion tracking between each frame, vReveal is able to stabilize videos extremely well. Now that we know a little bit about the software and what it is supposed to do, let's find out how it performs.

Getting Started:

If you've seen one installer you've seen them all, and vReveal setup wizard is no different. To begin you must click next, which has always been a little strange to me, because if I opened it up to install why should I have to verify that I want to install it? I digress. Upon next, you'll be greeted with MotionDSP's terms and conditions. You should of course read through them, although most people will just click next to get the software installed. So go ahead and sign away your life and the title to your vehicle as you hastily click "next" to get this program installed.

After you've agreed to the terms and conditions, you'll be asked to which folder you'd like to install vReveal. If you haven't precreated one, just do what every one does and click "next." From there your program will install, and you'll then be shown what I call "the finish screen." The finish screen gives you two options before you click "finish." Option one is to launch vReveal, and option two is to add an icon to your desktop. Simply select the ones you'd like and click "finish."

Now that we've got vReveal installed and ready to go, let's find out how well it works.